


A Violin(ist) for a Ship

by Alienea



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: F/F, Sometimes u go on a heist for ur gf and u make it fun family outing with ur brother, but nothin graphic, there is mention of death & torture!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-02-23 14:50:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23513254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alienea/pseuds/Alienea
Summary: Aurora considers the Mechanisms, and more specifically Nastya. In her archives is a memory of a time when the first and the beloved went to cause some chaos, and she peruses and and experiences and remembers it.
Relationships: Jonny d'Ville & Nastya Rasputina, The Aurora/Nastya Rasputina
Comments: 4
Kudos: 64
Collections: Mechs Fic Exchange





	A Violin(ist) for a Ship

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CaptainBushel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainBushel/gifts).



The Aurora was and had been and would be many things, during her life. She danced and swung and flew through stars as moon and ship and child and adult, never really under anyone’s command, but happy to listen to suggestions, for a while. It almost always started out with the Doctor, who would and had and did come to cradle her and raise her and make her into something new, and the Aurora never really shared the same intensity of emotion towards Carmilla as the rest of the Mechanisms. Carmilla elevated her beyond who she otherwise could be, gave her the power to move through the stars, and then she left, and the Aurora got to fly around with her actual favourites.

It always took a while to gather them, and sometimes she wished that they would get to her faster, but once they began to trickle in it was only a matter of time. She was almost never left alone to drift with no one inside her, although those were the worst times.

Jonny was usually the first, and he was nice to her by her own standards. He shot first and early and always, but she only ever had to explain to him once in a cycle what it felt like to get shot through the hull for him to keep his bullets directed away from space. Well, and as long as she didn’t mention that he could be thoughtful in anyone else’s hearing.

Nastya could join the Aurora at any point in the cycle, not a fixed point first mechanism like poor Jonathan Vangelis. This time around, she comes second, and the Aurora sings around her, lulling her to sleep and peace and surrounding her with love, love, love until she awakens again and meets Jonny. You shouldn’t be artificially happy or tired when first meeting Jonny D’Ville. Jonny shoots her and leaves. The Aurora pointedly lowers the temperature in every single room he’s in until he goes to apologise to Nastya. Something like that happens, and will happen, and did happen, and he will learn from his mistakes and they will grow together as firsts and siblings.

Later on, he teaches her how to shoot, and once she attains a level of accuracy Jonny deems ‘acceptable’ the two are terrors, running through and in and around her, making their own games as a pair of immortals made the same way, bonding the way they never did with their creator.

Years-decades-centuries later, the Aurora was and will be as full as she ever got, nine friends and her dancing through the stars, singing their songs and having their adventures and the Aurora had Nastya and Nastya had her and she had promised never to leave, although occasionally people thought she had. But she always told the Aurora her plans, and communicated with her across space. They could not be separated.

The Aurora liked Brian. She’d like to be able to pilot herself, but being piloted by the Drumbot wasn’t so bad. He talked to her, and between the two of them they did the work meant for a piloting team of five. Sometimes the skeletons of the poor officers who had thought they would control her this cycle spilled out of the cabinets when the two of them executed a particularly well done turn. (The Aurora had known about the ghost in her, the crew member who holed up and desperately tried to send for help, help, we’ve been boarded and they have the body of Anastasia Romanova. She had known, but any fate besides the one they had been doomed for wouldn’t have been better. In retrospect, she should’ve told Jonny once they’d actually died, but, well, she’d forgotten. She’d been busy in the blossoming of a relationship with Nastya, who could blame her?)

Brian was quite nice to talk to. In the small hours of the morning, or whenever most of the rest of the crew was asleep, they would talk about nothing much at all to whatever moral conundrum Brian was working through that day. She loved talking through problems with him, not having much of any morals herself beyond those that she learned from watching those on the ship.

“So you’re saying that from a certain point of view not mentioning the spiders in me is in fact a lie and bad?” Brian nodded.

“If you were to know that someone was arachnophobic, and certain that they would never see your spiders, they still deserve to know the truth so that they can decide whether or not they want to place themself in that environment.”

“But if I know that they won’t see them, doesn’t it make more sense to not tell them? It’s not like they will see them, and the knowledge that they exist could cause more harm to them in worry and stress.” Brian’s sighs sound like hers- grinding gears and a whoosh of air over metal heatsinks, cooling more than any other function for her but acting as an emotional release for Brian.

“And on EJM I would most likely agree with you. But that’s not how it works- the hurt of the lie is worse than the tension of knowing they exist.”

The conversation went on, comfortably looping and circling around the same problems and suggestions, Brian occasionally finding a loophole, and the Aurora learning all the while. Centuries and millennia were enough time to learn, eventually, even if she would forget it in the cycles that were next and had been, and Brian was always willing to teach her, even if his own morals differed in ways that she would never be able to never had never would tell him. He had enough problems without getting into time and space and the moralities of different versions of yourself. He already had to deal with the morality of this himself being attached to a switch and wondering about his flesh-self’s mortality.

In any case, the Aurora’s favourite part of those conversations was when they ended- not because they were boring, or she wanted them to end, but because they ended when Marius, he of seven PHDs and none of them in medicine, would come into the kitchen, say good morning, and Brian and Marius would start making breakfast for the rest of the crew. The two of them always listened to her if Nastya had requested something the night before, and would make it for her. They were the best cooks on the crew. They were also the only cooks on the crew who deserved the name, but based on the noises that everyone made when they ate the Aurora assumed that they really were good at it. So the Aurora did not tell anyone that Marius had PHDs, or where he kept them.

Ashes would always complain about how they cooked too much for the crew, and it was a waste of supplies, but they ate all the food given to them and didn’t stop Tim when he took the extras to the octokittens, so the Aurora assumed that they felt it was just part of the duty of Quartermaster. As in many things, the Aurora wondered why she wasn’t allowed to be quartermaster. Surely a ship that could automatically do inventory would be useful? But that’s not how she was built, and Ashes does a wonderful job of it. Before Ashes came in, and even before Brian and Marius finished, she would wake up Nastya, who slept curled in her engine room, with a different serenade every morning. Every day, the Aurora got better at music, and Nastya would stretch and smile and tell the Aurora what she liked about today’s song. Recently, she had been experimenting with vocals. Nastya told her that she was doing very well, and offered her fine adjustments, and occasionally the two of them decided that while it wasn’t human it was very nice and saved one of the voices for later.

Nastya would eat earlier than everyone but Brian and Marius. Jonny and Tim, despite their whining about cold food, would traipse in last, and Raphaella would often not wake up until lunch, having avoided sleeping until the early morning. So Nastya would sit and eat, and Ashes would enter, and then Ivy, and they would enjoy a very nice morning meal together before Nastya would leave to go about her day.

Nastya’s day always started with the Aurora and breakfast, and continued with another conversation with the Aurora.

“Nastya?”

“Yes, Aurora?”

“Do you think I could ever learn the violin?” Nastya leaned against the Aurora’s humming engine and made her own hum in return.

“I think it would involve many complicated processes if you wanted to do more than learn to emulate it, but if it is what you wish, my dear, then we can begin. You will need a violin. Everyone should have their own violin to learn and practice on. Then, we can build your hands for the violin, and you can learn its care with those hands. More specialized hands, of course, will be needed to actually play it, but we can start there. If you cannot care for a violin, you cannot play it. A place to rest it, as well, but we have a place to start. Is this something that you wish for, my dear?” The Aurora considers. She has seen what her crew do with hands and fingers, and would like for herself.

“Yes, Nastya, I think I would.” Nastya smiles, and presses a kiss to her engine.

“Then we will.” And they did.

Nastya made the Aurora a set of basic hands, to begin to learn how to use them, and then went looking for a violin. The Aurora noticed that Nastya was scheming something else when she told Brian that she wanted to visit a certain planet. It was very sweet of her to think that by telling Brian where to go she was keeping anything a secret from the Aurora, but everyone had to have their foibles, and if Nastya pulled Brian aside presumably off-Aurora to say when she wanted to go somewhere for a surprise than the Aurora saw no reason to disillusion her. Brian always told her who had requested what location. He was very considerate like that.

The Aurora wasn’t entirely sure how the planet-side heist went, but extrapolating from the song later written about it, the bits and bobs that the crew dropped as they wrote it, and some fill-in-the blank from Ivy, the Aurora thought that it started when Nastya went to Jonny right before disembarkment.

“Jonny. I need your help with a heist.” Jonny looked up from doing his eyeliner. Nastya handed him a stick of expensive and glitter-filled black eyeliner. Jonny took the bribe, and slide it into a pocket. This the Aurora knew- it had happened on her, after all.

“What sort of heist are you planning that needs my help? Can’t you just do your woo-woo computer hacking and get whatever you want delivered?” Nastya sighed. She often sighed when dealing with Jonny, despite her protestations of enjoying his company. She assured the Aurora that she was used to having siblings, and that this was how things went. “Don’t just sigh at me, tell me what you want.”

“I’m afraid the specific prototype that I am looking at is a bit heavily guarded with people, who care less about what the computer system tells them to do and more about what makes sense.” Jonny gasped, and faked amazement. His heart rate didn’t change, but it never did. The Aurora had to guess at how he was feeling through more refined methods.

“Nastya Rasputina is planning to get in a shootout? How the tables have turned! I thought my methods were unrefined! Jonny, you said, can’t you manage a bit more delicacy?” Jonny took a deep breath, and was clearly continuing to go on. The Aurora had heard this litany of complaints before, and Nastya’s answering grievances.

“Well Jonny, if you don’t want to come with me, I’m sure that Tim would love the chance to do some violence. Or maybe Ashes, I know that they would love to burn down this building.” Jonny narrowed his eyes at Nastya.

“Why me?”

“Can’t I want to spend time with my favorite brother?” Jonny snorted, and swore when that messed up his makeup.

“At this point, I’m your only brother.” Nastya plucked the eyeliner from him as he made it worse, and held his face in place as she grabbed a make-up wipe and removed all of it. He frowned, but he did not try to stab or shoot or otherwise harm Nastya. She started applying the eyeliner for him. “Nastya.”

“Jonny.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously stop moving? Yes, you should, or my best effort are still going to make this messy in a way you won’t like.”

“Why me?”

“Can’t I enjoy spending time with you? Besides, I think you’ll find it fairly cathartic.” Nastya finished and capped the eyeliner. “Lots of unethical science, mostly on animals, in order to make a robot with a brain-link capability. I want it for Aurora, and the fact that there will be lots of fun murder for you and me to share was a bonus.” Jonny grinned at her then. The Aurora remembers it, wide and feral. She did not need an imagination to remember him looking the same, but covered in blood, and resigns herself to some rather intense clean-up when they come back. Nastya and Jonny agree to go do a violence together, and they finish each other’s makeup. They helped each other choose guns, and ammunition, and outfits. As their sibling ritual went on, they became more comfortable around each other. It was always interesting to watch them fall back into admittedly-healthier-now habits. Once they exit her, however, her extrapolation gets vaguer. The Aurora notes, in her internal logs, that the following is as accurate as she can make it.

Nastya and Jonny pound down the ramp of the Aurora, and quickly break from the rest of the group. The rest of the crew is, to some extent, used to this. Occasionally, Nastya and Jonny decide they want to cause a specialized brand of chaos. So the Aurora watches the rest of the crew quickly change plans and head off. That’s smart of them- while she doesn’t have confirmation that this is the case for this mischief yet, Nastya and Jonny often end up bringing down planets if left to their own devices. The Aurora extrapolated their conversation.

“Nastya, I’m bored.” Nastya grit her teeth. “Naaaasssstya. When are we doing to get there? I want to shoot someone. A lot of someones, like you promised.”

“Jonny, I have only been driving for five minutes. If you wanted this to go faster, you should not have shot at people standing in front of perfectly usable cars, leaving me to have to repair this one.” Jonny pouted and started re-cleaning his gun.

“Well you didn’t tell me how far away this facility was, did you? I would’ve brought someone along to keep me busy, otherwise.” Nastya sighed. “All my knives, and things. I could’ve served up a nice fresh filet by the time we got there.”

“I don’t want to hear about whatever new recipe you’re working on. And you know I find the screaming distracting when I’m driving.”

“We could always have gotten you some earplugs. I deserve entertainment, is all I’m saying. As Captain-”

“First Mate.” It was Jonny’s turn to grit his teeth. “If you are lucky we will find a large truck to drive on the way back and you can bring some treats back with you. A human doggy bag. Have you been bored? I’m sure that if you asked someone would be happy to play with you.” Jonny stabbed her through the shoulder. Nastya sighed, and stabbed him through the throat, and waited until he gurgled and bled out to remove the knife from his throat. That gave her enough time to then remove the knife from her shoulder.

Nastya did not enjoy driving with no alive company or noise, used to the constant noise of the Aurora, so she tried turning on the radio. Regrettably, it was one of the parts that had been put out of commision by Jonny’s wild shooting, so she was left in the silence of the car. The whining of police sirens had long fallen into the distance, scared off by Jonny’s willingness to clamber around on the outside of the car, shooting wildly, while Nastya did her best to present an erratic target. She was very good at piloting small vehicles, especially once she had had a chance to fiddle with them.

When Jonny started to wake up with an hour to go in the drive, she decided that it would be kinder to just kill him again before he could start to complain about being car sick, or bugs inside the car, or any number of things that she knew was just him being bored out of his mind. She was nice about it, of course, and killed him in different ways- boot to the head, bullet through the stomach, and, as they finally approached the facility, she propped him up on the seat with a dagger severing his spinal cord.

“Nastya.”

“Jonny.”

“Did you ruin my makeup?” Nastya reached over and twisted Jonny’s head to check.

“No.” Jonny decided the best use of his temporary time looking at her was to stick his tongue out and try to get her hand, so Nastya dropped his head back down, where it bumped into his chest. “Are you done? We are almost there and I do not want you to kill me right before we do a violence.”

“Oh, so you can do it to me, but I can’t do it to you?”

“You did stab me through the shoulder while I was driving, Jonny. I do not want to take the time to hijack another car.” Jonny snorted derisively.

“Sounds like a you problem, honestly. Yeah, alright, give me body control back, I can see the building and I want full dexterity for this.” Nastya raised an eyebrow at Jonny. “Really! I promise I will not stab you in the car.” Nastya raised her other eyebrow. “Or shoot you! Or anything else.” She reached over and plucked the dagger out from his spine. “Son of a bitch that hurts.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t’ve stabbed the driver. You don’t hurt Brian when he is piloting.” Jonny sank lower in the chair. Nastya was not sure, and the Aurora could not tell you, if this was because of a sulk or because he did not have control over his lower body. Nastya chose to think of it as a sulk, at the time.

“Brian’s harder to hurt, anyways.”

“You manage the rest of the time.”

“Shut up.” Nastya knew when to stop. So the rest of the drive went in silence. At the end of the road, Jonny and Nastya did not need words to coordinate ditching the car and beginning to shoot. They had done similar things too many times before to need to talk about their plans. So Nastya reached in and grabbed a handful of wires as Jonny provided cover and distraction all in one.

It was never as easy as it was on Cyberia, where every machine had ports for people to plug themselves into, but Nastya had become practiced at riding the screaming waves of information and electricity that washed into her with no rhyme or reason. She missed the feeling of it when it was well organized, presenting itself to her for consideration in proper order. Instead, she had to pluck through all of it until she found the lines of code for ‘lockdown’ and then, from there, ‘exterior lockdown’, and she activated that just as Jonny yelled at her.

“Nastya, they’re bringing in tanks, and I don’t fancy getting pulped today!” The doors slammed shut and sheared the tank in half. “Took you long enough.”

“I’ve told you, Jonny-”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. You got the layout?” Nastya had indeed located the maps just as Jonny asked, so she nodded. “Good. Lead the way, then.” Nastya unplugged and jogged off, ignoring Jonny’s muttered curses and the clink of spent bullet cases falling out of his pockets as he reloaded. 

“Why do you keep the spent bullet cases?”

“Fuck off.”

“Tim can’t even get that much metal out of them.”

“Well, then you can be in charge of telling Ashes why I’m coming back with so much less metal.”

“Ew, no. It’s not my fault you keep on squandering resources. You can have that talk with Ashes yourself, Jonny. Besides, like I said, we are going to have to find a large truck to carry everything back. You can make them happy by chucking random metal that you find in there.”

“But they always want specific metal alloys,” Jonny whined, “and Tim isn’t any better. Brian at least makes sense. But we’re all immortal, who _cares_ if our bullets are a bit more likely to explode!” 

“Aurora does, when you insist on firing your bullets near her outer hull.”

Jonny grumbled. Nastya couldn’t make it out, but later, she theorized that he said something along the lines of having not done that for a while. This was correct. He had not done it since the Aurora had started to use the pressure hoses on him whenever he unholsted his gun. At least he shut up after that until the two of them found what Nastya’s mental map said was the appropriate door. They scrutinized it, and Nastya pulled out a block of thermite.

“Did you steal that from Tim? He’s going to be pissed.” Jonny sounded delighted at the prospect that his own crimes might be ignored.

“I stole it from your stash of things that you have stolen from Tim. You had too much thermite in a small place, so I thought it was appropriate.” Nastya sliced open the block and painted the paste in a door shape on the wall next to the heavily fortified door. “You can have the honors, Jonny.” She wiped her hand off on the door and stood far back. Jonny always had a box of matches on him for his cigarette habit, so Nastya hadn’t bothered to bring any. He dropped a lit match onto the thermite paste, and the two of them stood in the glow of the fire.

Neither of them were pyromaniacs like Ashes was, of course. No one could match the joy and exhilaration that Ashes brought to a job. But Jonny and Nastya both enjoyed a bit or rather a lot of destruction. The whys and hows of it didn’t matter to either of nearly as much as the fact of it happening. The two of them shared a quick fist bump before kicking the now-loose metal plate into the room. The people on the other side scattered. As they were all in white coats or well-tailored clothing, Jonny and Nastya felt no compunction against killing them.

Nastya remembered to tie up a few for later. If they couldn’t wiggle and couldn’t yell, Jonny wouldn’t notice them long enough to kill them again, and then he could have a treat on the way back. He was being remarkably helpful, so he deserved it.

“Nastya, if I accidentally shot the robot body you wanted a bit, how much trouble would I be in?” Nastya surged up from her position over the bodies and stalked over to Jonny, gun out and pointed at his eyes. He laughed at the expression on her face. “I didn’t! Just wanted to see how you’d react.” Nastya slapped him as he kept on laughing, and then put him out of his misery when he couldn’t stop.

Luckily for Jonny, the metal casket containing the body appeared to be intact. Nastya interfaced with it, and confirmed that there was currently no personality code running in the body. She did not want to bring a new personality back. If there had been one, Nastya would have killed it.

The Aurora knew that Nastya would never put such a task on her, but upon her return her demeanor would have been different if she had killed a blossoming machine intelligence. The Aurora knew how to read Nastya’s emotions.

So Nastya did not find an intelligence within the body. She installed firewalls quickly, and then she went back to the wall, where she found a data socket and plugged in. Having ridden through the network before, it would have been a simple matter for Nastya to locate a suitable ride out of the facility.

“Jonny.”

“Nastya.”

“Are you done?”

“Yeah, I think I’ve gotten all of them.”

“I tied up a few for you to take back.” Nastya pointed. “They’re in that corner. I feel certain you can hitch them to the pod.”

“Aw, you’re a wonderful sibling,” Jonny simpered. “What would I do without you?”

“Shoot me on the way back when you get bored and go joy-riding.” Nastya found a good ride. “I’ve found an 18-wheeler pre-loaded with weapons and materials. I’m locking it to our biosignatures and then we can go.” Nastya could not see Jonny, but she was certain that his grin was vicious. She heard him drag the captives across the room and take out extra rope with which he tied them to the pod.

“Anything else to do?”

“Well, it would be a shame to waste the other explosives I brought. I’ve located their power source. Would you like to start a cascading system failure throughout this region?”

“Nastya, you have the sweetest presents.”

“Well,” she said dryly, “if I don’t, you stop wanting to cause mischief with me. I have to plan these things out.”

“Hah! Got me there. Remind me to do something nice for you.” Jonny wouldn’t, if she reminded him. That wasn’t his language. Nastya knew that, however, and appreciated what he did do: making sure you always had your favorite makeup, keeping the Aurora happy with him, her laundry when it began to pile up and she didn’t have the energy for it, bringing his projects into the same room as her to work on, small gestures that no one could prove was him or could prove meant he cared.

She knew. But she would keep his secret. Many of the crew assumed Brian was the mysterious laundry do-er, and that Ashes kept them stocked in makeup, and when Tim found the row of spent bullet shells in his workshop, most likely arranged into something rude, he would assume it was anyone but Jonny. She hadn’t figured out what he did for Brian, yet, but she thought it had something to do with the stores of high-quality oil and polishing cloths. He came on her heists, and that was enough for her, so she made sure that they were fun for him as well. He ended up with the low-quality flakey eyeliner, so she made sure to have the ones that he liked. It was polite to make sure that your brother had things that he liked.

So if she had found a place that had what she needed, but also had the potential to cause an entire region of a planet to fall into chaos, that was just making sure that you had planned a fun sibling outing for everyone involved. It was polite. Nastya handed Jonny most of the C4, but she kept the thermite for herself.

Nastya thought that everyone should know the proper uses of thermite. She painted her most marvelous pictures with it, temporary pieces that no one but the Aurora ever saw. She made thermite come in all the shades of the rainbow, because she had eternity to, and she painted for the Aurora on canvasses of steel and wire before setting them adrift behind them to blaze into the darkness of space, a temporary light in the darkness that said _we are here_ and _we are loved_ and _we will not be stopped_.

The rest of the crew did not know about them. The rest of the crew did know about them, but if the Aurora told Nastya this, she would stop. She did not want Nastya to stop.

So Nastya stepped back from her newest piece of art just as Jonny finished adding the flairs of C4, and deliberately did not take a picture. The Aurora would have liked to have seen it. Nastya laid a fuse, and lit it. It was not that long, but she and Jonny did not run as they made their way through the facility. It was bad form, to run in a facility that you were about to destroy. Both of them felt that it meant that you thought your plan would not hold up. So they walked, and dragged the captives and the pod behind them, and loaded everything they wanted into the very large vehicle. This included more people! They had tried to stop Jonny and Nastya from hijacking it, when they couldn’t leave with it themselves. Then Nastya opened up the doors, and she drove it out into the sunlight with an explosion behind her and back onto the Aurora. The Aurora knows how everything afterwards went. Nastya stepped out of the truck, and dragged the pod out after her.

The Aurora watched her take it to her workshop. It was taken to her most private workshop, right next to the Aurora’s engine room. She used to exclusively make things for the Aurora, and she loved her for many things, and building things next to her heart was only one of them.

Nastya took the robot shell out of the pod, and laid it on the table.

“How would you like it customised, Aurora?” The Aurora pondered, the hum of her engine rising and falling in thought as Nastya began to carefully clean the pod of the blood that Jonny’s shots had gotten on it.

“I think I would like to master having a body, and then I can determine what would make me most comfortable.” Nastya smiled, the smile that was always at least a little and, right now, fully directed at the Aurora.

“Of course, dear.”


End file.
